Meaningful Bodies: Standing as Metaphor

We call ourselves wise (homo sapiens) and argue that our language differentiates us
from other species of animals. But even more substantially, we define ourselves by
our ancestors' revolutionary achievement of a standing posture (homo erectus). We
became human, in one sense, because we stood up. In another sense, we are who we are
because of what that physical act has been made to stand for, primarily through words
that share the *sta root. Consider the implications of the following sentence, constructed
largely of such words: As creatures of language, we constantly, insistently, even
obstinately establish superstitions and understandings related to the constitutive
circumstances of our existence by systematic reference to our substantial station
and stature as standing beings, as static and ecstatic beings whose destiny is to
submit to entropy by allowing things to stagnate or to resist entropy by causing them
to stand.As these words graphically illustrate, metaphors of standing determine our conceptions
of time and space; they shape our understanding of existence and ecstasy; they are
the tools and the subject of philosophy and painting, poetry and fiction, sculpture
and law, history and psychology, anthropology and linguistics, archaeology and teleology.
Wherever, in short, humans have paid attention to our status as human beings, we have
done so through embodied metaphors, including many from the standing family.The IS Topics Course on "Meaningful Bodies: Standing as Metaphor" will be a series
of discussions about variations on this theme by sculptors, painters, poets, novelists,
and philosophers.